Potable water is essential for life. However, in many parts of the world potable water is not readily available particularly under natural disasters conditions such as fires, drought, flooding or earthquakes which may have caused normal sources of potable water to become contaminated. As such, disaster relief response requires that potable water be made available to the disaster survivors as soon as possible. This frequently requires that potable water be brought in from other unaffected areas which is slow, costly and difficult to distribute to the those in the most need of the potable water. In many cases, indigenous water may be available and could suffice if adequate treatment could be performed to remove pathogenic organisms and other contaminants such as dissolved and suspended organic matter, toxic metals and sediment. As with supplied potable water, skid mounted or package water treatment systems require that the equipment be brought to the disaster location and operated from a generally centralized location from which potable water is distributed. While this response may be a viable solution over a protracted period of time, the disaster survivors located in remote areas may not be able to receive potable for several days, thus a need exists that provides a simple and effective way to provide potable water to disaster survivors before more elaborate water treatment systems are made available.
The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.